Book Image

phpBB: A User Guide

Book Image

phpBB: A User Guide

Overview of this book

phpBB is a free, open source Internet community application, with outstanding discussion forums and membership management. Written in the PHP scripting language, and making use of the popular MySQL database, phpBB is a standard among web hosting companies throughout the world, and is one of the most widely-used bulletin board packages in the world. This book is an abridged version of "Building Online Forums with phpBB 2", (ISBN 1904811132), focusing on a complete set of topics to help you set up and run your own phpBB-powered online community. This book gives you the power to use phpBB to set up and run your own online discussion forums with ease. It takes you through the whole process of setting up your phpBB site, and helps you create, customize, and manage your own online community with phpBB. Written by experienced phpBB administrators and enthusiasts, the emphasis is on simple and practical guidance for you to get the most from phpBB. Packed with step-by-step examples, this book is your ideal guide to learning phpBB.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Post-Installation Tasks


After you've installed phpBB, you need to perform a few post-install operations, namely to delete unneeded directories and to set some basic configuration options.

Time For Action—Deleting Unneeded Directories

  1. Connect to your server via FTP (skip this step for local installations).

  2. Go to the directory where phpBB is installed.

  3. Delete the install and contrib directories.

  4. (Optionally) delete the docs directory as well.

What Just Happened?

After a successful installation, when you visit your new phpBB forum's homepage you'll get a hint about your post-install tasks. You're advised to delete the install and contrib directories, because leaving them on the server is considered a security risk, so big that phpBB won't even run if it detects their presence.

The doc directory can be deleted as well if you like; it's not a security threat, but can save some disk space.

Basic Configuration

After the unneeded directories are deleted, you can access your new and shiny bulletin board...